Implementing new ideas in an organisation is a challenge.

You agree:

From internal politics to bureaucracy to lack of time, we face many obstacles…

Yet, your company needs a leader like you. That’s because you care enough to make sure the business grows and keeps to innovating.

Here are 11 effective tips to persuade your boss.

People who’ve used these tips got their boss to implement new ideas and encourage innovation. This is a guide to help you make innovation happen.

Warning: you are NOT going to find anything about being a bootlicker (dull) or working hard (boring) here.

Running a great creative project requires discipline.

You need a clear focus on the results (1).

You also have to anticipate what’s ahead of you–to know what you need to make happen and what could go wrong (2).

“Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.”

— Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

The following checklists are here to help you run your creative projects by (1) focusing on the results and (2) anticipating what’s going to happen.

1. Focus on the results of your creative projects

What’s the purpose of this project?

Sharing constructive feedback gives you this ability to guide your team members and help them learn and grow.

Unfortunately, we never learn how to give feedback. We assume that it is intuitive; and that you should naturally master this skill.

But in practice, giving feedback feels uncomfortable.

We even often avoid doing it…

[In these reflections, I focus on “individual feedback” given to a team member (e.g. superior, peer, or subordinate). This excludes traditional employee review, team performance check-in, and managing yourself with feedback analysis.]

Feedback is an undervalued tool.

Gathering the best books for entrepreneurs and other great resources wasn’t an easy job.

You will agree with me that there are so many books about entrepreneurship out there…

So I narrowed down the list only to the best resources. This is going to save you so much time. 😁

If you like these recommendations, share it with your friends, classmates, and colleagues.

 

The following lists focus on the crème de la crème of resources and books for entrepreneurs and executives.

Running a workshop is an effective way to train a group or get them to do collaborative work.

But there’s still lots of misunderstanding around how to do this.

As part of running innovation projects at What If, we use workshops as a tool to harvest and leverage the creativity of our project teams.

Though I cannot recreate online the exciting experience of participating in one of these workshops, I wanted to share with you some of the most useful things you can implement in your workshops.

Knowing how to deliver a great speech is an essential skill for a leader.

Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Barack Obama… They are great speakers. We all remember them for how they spoke in public.

But we don’t deliver speeches to such large audiences every day. Right?

We’re more likely to talk to the team we lead, to present something to stakeholders, or to speak at an event.

So it’s good to use these public figures to inspire us. But we also need practical tools to improve how we convey a message or tell a story.

Feedback analysis is a necessary tool, if you want to perform at a higher level.

Let’s start thinking about what is going to happen in the next 365 days or 8,760 hours. (If you sleep 8 hours per night, this means 5,840 hours to have fun and create new thing). In this article I will explain a method to set a feedback analysis in order to assess what are your strengths and weaknesses. I also give you a spreadsheet template that will help you to set your New Year’s goals and assess your results.

For more than 9 years, I’ve been writing to educate, convince, inspire, negotiate, and sell.

Here are 16 practical things you can apply to improve your writing…

16 Useful Things that Will Help to Sell and Convince through Writing

1. Know who you’re writing to.

Who is going to read? What are they interested in? Keep one reader in mind. You shouldn’t address a group but just one reader.

2. Value your readers’ time more than yours.

Each piece should be the one that your reader shouldn’t miss regarding a specific topic. If not, there’s no reason to hit “publish” or “send”.

As a leader, you must agree:

Constantly making sure that your team remains engaged and motivated is a real challenge, especially since we’re all so busy.

Here’s a simple solution to know how they feel:

Organise a Clearing Session with your team.

How to Run Your Next Clearing Sessions

At the end of every week, meet with your team and ask these two questions:

1. What is not working for you?
2. What is working for you?

One person at a time answers the first question. And when everyone is done—you included—the team starts answering the second question.

 

Creativity is key in established businesses as well as startups.

The former needs to find new areas of growth while leveraging and fighting against its structural inertia, whilst the latter must deal with initial fragility.

Problem: many idea killers prevent innovation from happening.

In many cases, brainstorming is one of these idea killers.

Let’s see why.

Creating and implementing new ideas are essential, core competencies in today’s business world. As Rita Gunther McGrath explains in her book The End of Competitive Advantage: